All right, welcome to this demo.
This is the first one in this course,
and what we're going to use it for is to actually install pfSense. This
way we have the firewall installed and ready to go for our follow‑on
demos where we'll actually be segmenting the network and setting up
remote access protections and authentications with Active Directory. So,
the first thing that we need to do is download pfSense. And if you go to
the pfSense website,
you can download the latest version by just clicking on this
link. And as you can see, as of this recording,
the most recent version is version 2.6,
which is what we're already going to be using in the lab. Now,
I've already downloaded this, but if you wanted to you can select your
image to download based on your architecture, and you could even
download the daily snapshot builds that they have.
So let's hop over to our vCenter instance, and as you can see, I already have
other hosts here that we'll be using throughout this course,
more specifically, our domain controller and the jump box,
and then we have a test PC down here.
So the first thing that I'm going to do is go ahead and create a
new virtual machine, and we'll call it GloboFW.
I'm just going to put it on this data store,
leave the compatibility, and then for the actual operating
system, we're going to do FreeBSD 12 or later.
Now if you're not building this virtually and you're using an actual
physical firewall from pfSense, then that's awesome.
You shouldn't have to worry about configuring this stuff because it should
already be installed and you should be able to just plug it in and get going,
but if you're doing a virtual machine, then there's some aspects of the
configuration that we have to customize first.
All right, we'll give it some resources here.
We probably don't even need this much, but I just wanted to make
sure that we don't have any problems in the lab.
Again, make sure you scale up your CPU and your memory,
your hard drive space based on your actual use cases for this and
the amount of traffic that you'll be seeing.
We also need to have multiple interfaces, right?
So this first one is going to be our WAN interface, and then for the
purposes of this course, we're going to be adding two other
interfaces to represent two other networks.
So, two different VLANs, one of them is going to be our management
device VLAN, and the other one is going to be our user VLAN. All right,
now that those interfaces are created for our respective VLANs, all we
have to do is add the image or the ISO file. And it looks like our data
store is not working.
Let's go see if we have the file somewhere else.
All right, so let's go ahead and we'll just create it like this for now.
So the virtual machine is created, but before we do that,
we need to add the actual ISO file.
All right.
And I just finished uploading that file to the data store.
So let's go into the firewall and edit the settings.
I stored just in the built‑in data store,
under the images folder. And here it is, the pfSense 2.6 release.
We'll put that in the DVD drive and make sure we connect it.
That way it boots on startup. And then now we just have to turn
it on and complete the installation.
We'll go in and watch it boot up, and as you can see, we have some options,
we're just going to let it boot so we can install it. Now this is
going to run in and install the pfSense firewall on this virtual
machine image for FreeBSD that we created.
We'll walk through the prompts real quick, and then we
just hit Install pfSense. We'll keep the default key map,
but if you need to change it,
you can. We'll do auto‑guided ZFS for the disk, and then we'll leave
all this the standard size. Should only need to modify this if you have
a custom installation that you want to do,
that you know specifically create RAID disks and stuff like that.
Now that that's done, we walk through all the prompts, we're just going
to go ahead and let it install. And I'll fast‑forward this clip right
here so we don't have to wait and watch it.
So in reality, it might take a few minutes or longer, depending on your
setup, but in this clip it'll only take a couple of seconds.
All right, and now that the installation is finished,
we can make some modifications if we wanted to in the shell.
Let's hit Yes and see what we have. I'm not going to do anything.
And let's reboot. While that's booting,
we can go ahead and undo the CD drive as well. Now that it's fully installed,
we don't need that anymore. You can disconnect it. And upon this first boot,
it's going to bring us into the initial configuration screen, and as you can
see, we have three different interfaces. We'll make sure we IP them correctly
and get the firewall set up to be able to manage it in the GUI. So we're not
going to set up VLANs just yet.
Now, vmx0 is the interface that we designated for that WAN
connection, so we're going to type that, and then vmx1 is the LAN
interface, but we're going to change that name once we get to the
GUI. And then vmx2 is the optional one,
the additional one that we created. All right, and now that we're in here,
we need to set some IP addresses. So we'll hit 2 and set our IP
addresses. I'll do it for the WAN interface. And we're going to hit no
for IPv6. What this is asking us is if we want it to use the insecure
protocol for HTTP for the web configurator,
which is the GUI. So we're going to hit no.
And we have our IP address set for the WAN interface now. We'll do the LAN
interface real quick as well, and this is going to be my default gateway
for what's going to be our management network.
All right, now that that's done,
we should be able to reset the web password as well,
so we'll do that real quick, and then we should be able to jump into it.
All right, now that that's done, the password is reset to what it should be,
we can go ahead and try to get into it.